Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) (13 page)

“So the mothership is more of a barge, not a true assault carrier. They aren’t using a navy at all – their ships are one-use amphibious tubs.”

“On the outside, quite true, sir. However, there is a valuable, reusable core to the mothership. The cores don’t even mount capital-class weapons, only a few defensive systems apparently designed to allow them time to escape with their FTL drive. By this we deduce their commanders value themselves, but their armies are, in essence, suicide troops.”

“Do these suicide troops have capital weapons? Nukes, for example?”

“A few, sir, but not in large numbers. We believe they don’t like destroying things they want to eat.”

Absen stood up and took the podium, waving Fleede aside as his eyes swept across his staff. “Then we have essentially three problems to solve, people. One, the obvious, is how to keep this horde from winning in its first massive rush. Two, how to stop their motherships from escaping to tell of their defeat and bring more Scourges. Three, and most importantly, how to seize a mothership, so we can capture and exploit its FTL technology. I’m pretty confident we’re well on the way to solving number two, and if we don’t achieve number one, the rest will hardly matter. So listen to Fleede here and digest all his detail. Study these Scourges like you studied the Meme. Figure out how to beat them and avoid dying in the process. And find me answers to those three questions. Scoggins, you take the Red Team. Ford, you’re Blue. Ms. Conquest, you’re the impartial referee and simulations goddess. Oh, and figure how we’re going to get some warning before these things show up. Go on, get to work.”

“But sir,” Fleede protested as the conference room dissolved into a buzz of conversation, “I have a lot more slides…I know, package them up and shoot them to your desk, right?”

“Yes, Commander. Your reporting is very thorough, and I prefer to study it alone with the concentration it deserves.”

“Thank you…Commander, you said?”

“Absolutely. You’ve earned it.” Soon, Absen knew, promotions wouldn’t be hard to come by. Not if this was going to get as bloody as it looked.

No, what she faced was far more frightening than mere injury or death. Four thousand years had passed since she had touched another Meme in the flesh. While rudimentary communication was possible using translation programs, a true dialogue would only take place via exchange of memory molecules, those packets of information that served the amoeba-like creatures as mind, voice and data storage.

Blends did this as well, but at a far shallower level. She remembered sharing
with
a Meme,
as
a Meme, was as intimate as sex, but not nearly as fun. What worried her more was what her contact might find out about her – about Raphael, and what he did so long ago.

How he was not merely a rebel, but a bald-faced, deliberate traitor to the Empire.

If they learned that, and realized she held more of humanity’s secrets in her mind than any other, would they even let her go? If the worst happened, she and her ship were prepared to fight, even detonate the suicide nuke.

So she prepared her mental defenses with all the skill she possessed.

Rae wished once more that Henrich had let her meet with Leslie, but as he’d pointed out, he had no definitive proof that either Blend was who she said she was, and until he did, they would remain apart. He’d allowed her a video chat, but no physical contact.

Back on
Conquest
, she’d considered trying to circumvent the security placed around her, but without understanding the capabilities of the ship’s AI, doing so seemed doomed to failure and would poison the relationship Henrich was allowing to grow between them. As his trust she had destroyed a century ago was only now rebuilding, she simply couldn’t take such a risk. At times, she’d waited years to see her children, and she could wait again.

Patience came a bit easier to an ageless being.

Though for her two dead children, Rae would wait forever. Or at least until she died, and thus found out for sure that no afterlife existed. Before Andrew and Stephanie’s deaths, she’d neither believed nor cared about anything as ridiculous as the supernatural, but now…now she understood one simple reason other people did. They just wanted to be reunited with their loved ones. The hopeful fantasy of a Heaven or Paradise or Nirvana was preferable to facing cold, eternal oblivion.

Now the Meme ship swelled on her screen, even with no magnification, and soon Rae felt the soft bump as the two craft nudged together and joined, skin to skin. Openings grew in both, forming a short tunnel through their outer integuments, growing into a chamber. The meeting place would be a floored bubble composed half of each ship, under the watchful eyes of both.

Standing up, Rae adjusted the formal yellow silk robe she wore, more akin to a genuine Japanese kimono than anything – not the flimsy robe Westerners associated with that name, but ten kilos of cloth in several layers. It was something she’d had made for the meeting, in imitation of the traditions of the first-generation Blends familiar to the pure Meme.

When she entered the chamber, a Meme was already there, resting in its shallow, Jacuzzi-sized bowl that helped it retain its shape without strain. Next to the receptacle a chair squatted like a low throne, and without ceremony she strode over to sit in it, all of her senses alert. Maintaining contact with her ship using the bioradio and chip she’d installed in her own head, she waited for the other to make the first move.

When the Meme extended a pseudopod toward her, a stream of pale flesh like jelly within a translucent skin, she almost got up and ran. Instead, she steeled herself and reached out her bare hand. Its touch felt light, warm, and dry, not the moist thing she had expected, and slowly, slowly, she began to hear its thoughts, carried by billions of sophisticated molecules even now penetrating her skin and making their way through her bloodstream to her brain.

Rae met those thoughts with her own, just as she had done with Blends over the last fifty years of the Empire’s occupation, and she found it not so difficult to erect a barrier to hold them away from her core. If she could maintain and project the image of a childish, cruel and debauched first-generation Blend to fool her own kind, with life and death in the balance, she could certainly manage this apparently benign contact. As far as she could tell, the other did not push or probe.

I am SystemLord One
, the Meme said.
I have come here without even my trium to speak with you, something that has not been done with Underlings in millennia.

“I am no Underling, SystemLord,” Rae returned. “I reject the Empire’s artificial divisions and political system. I am the designated ambassador from Humans to Meme.”

You are not the Human SystemLord?

“No. I am its representative. The Human SystemLord is not able to speak as we do.”

Are you part of its trium?

Rae hesitated. “Yes,” she finally answered, but the damage had been done. The Meme abruptly withdrew its pseudopod, lapsing back into the bowl.

Rae folded her hands into her lap, nonplussed. She’d felt it important to establish her equality with any Meme, but the creature had a point. She was not its political equal. Apparently it had expected a summit between supreme leaders, not a diplomatic exchange. Watching calmly even while clutching her fingers tightly together, she waited for the Meme to flow back into its ship and abandon the dialogue.

And she waited.

It neither left, nor reestablished contact, for almost three hours, but Rae knew how to be patient. To one that had waited for years, even decades, for just the right moment to introduce some concept or influence on human history, three hours was nothing. As long as the amoeba did not leave the chamber, she had hope.

Without warning, the Meme stirred and, from within itself, lifted an eyeball the size of a grapefruit on a stalk to peer at her for a moment. Then it reached and she met its touch once more.

I have decided to condescend to have congress with you despite your lower rank, if you can assure me you are a close associate of your SystemLord.

“Our organization is different, but my rank and status is equivalent to the Human SystemLord, save that not I, but he, is in charge.”

Your ways are alien to us. I fail to understand how you can claim equivalence if it commands and not you, but I am not intolerant or unsophisticated. I will accept your assertion. At least you speak the Pure Language.

Rae exulted within herself then, for it seemed that this SystemLord failed to detect, or even realize, that she was a defector. Perhaps it did not care, as once a Meme blended, to other Meme it lost its identity and status. Despite her extensive research of the lords of the Empire, interacting with one in the flesh showed her how little she really understood about them – rather like the difference between studying a human culture in a university and living among its people – and similarly, how little the Meme understood about the aliens they attacked, plagued, and enslaved.

“Let’s put aside the details of protocol, SystemLord, for I believe we have more important things to talk about. I speak of the Scourge.”

Yes. If not for the Scourge, all would be as it should be in the universe. The Scourge upsets the natural order of things, so that even the Pure Race must humble itself to speak with such as you. If rightness is to be restored, we will accept your willing assistance and sacrifice on the part of the Empire.

Rae chuckled to herself at SystemLord’s instinctive arrogance
.
“Thanks so much, SystemLord. Let’s talk practicalities. First, we must agree on a truce, and hopefully an alliance. We are not to be your vassals or underlings. My SystemLord and you will each command his own forces, and all such forces will refrain from taking any hostile action against the others until a minimum of thirty Earth days after the Scourge is driven from this system.”

I agree.

This simple, immediate declaration surprised Rae, but she refused to show it, and pressed on. “Second, we need all intelligence, all information of any sort you have about the Scourge. If we are to fight it, we must understand it. We will also share all we have with you.”

I agree.

“Third, you must immediately and permanently relinquish all claim to this star system and all its facilities including the great laser on Earth’s moon, and to the Gliese 370 system that Humans recently conquered, and agree never again to attack worlds colonized by Human, Ryss or Sekoi. With Human permission you may graze your ships on unclaimed and uninhabited planetary bodies, asteroids and comets, as long as it does not interfere with Humans or their other non-Meme allies.”

That is preposterous. We own this system by right of conquest. Besides, those you call the Ryss are of Species 447, which has murdered hundreds of our planets. They cannot be trusted.

“We have to let these grudges die, SystemLord, or at least put them aside. And no matter what, within a short time we will take this system back from you. Using our superior technology we will seize Earth just as we seized the gas giant and all its facilities, destroyed two Weapons, and killed two Monitors – along with, I presume the previous SystemLord, thereby providing you with your current exalted position. I bet you were just the senior Destroyer commander until that happened, am I right?”

You are correct, and your logic is impeccable, despite its bitter taste. However, I am faced therefore with choosing between two undesirable alternatives: accept your conditions and fight the Scourge, or depart with my comrades, leaving you to your fate. The first is quite risky for me personally, though it may be of greatest benefit to the Empire to deal the Scourge a blow and accept you as allies. The second is far safer for me and my subordinates, and will guarantee me a much longer life. If we run far enough, we could find another system to take, where the Scourge will likely never find us.
With this, the Meme paused, waiting.

Rae waited, and thought, trying to discern the Meme’s unspoken message.

When some ten minutes had gone by without further communication, yet the Meme had not withdrawn its touch, Rae said, “So you’re telling me we need you more than you need us. Yet if you fight us, you will die, and if you try to run, my SystemLord may decide to destroy your ships, killing you in the process, as escaping enemies. But my commander is merciful, even toward you who have done him much wrong. He wants me to find a way for us both to benefit – to eradicate the Scourge here, and perhaps to eventually live alongside the Empire in peace and freedom, rather than perpetuating the killing. So my question to you is simple: what must we do to persuade you of this?”

We must have your lightspeed drive technology,
SystemLord immediately answered.

So this is the price.
Aghast, Rae thought furiously behind the masks of her mind. She took her time, knowing that the Meme would not grow impatient for minutes or hours, if she required it.

On one hand, the lightspeed drive was humanity and its allies’ major ace, their trump card that allowed them to dominate any otherwise equal Meme military force. Implemented as the TacDrive, with its vast array of generators and capacitors, it made one warship superior to many not so equipped.

On the other hand, the current Meme weapons suite of hypers and fusors were not well suited to take advantage of the lightspeed drive, so they wouldn’t get nearly as much mileage out of the technology as humanity and its allies had, at least not soon. They would probably use it mainly for star-to-star voyages, making their ships effectively undetectable and unstoppable until they dropped pulse, as
Desolator
and his kin had used it. Therefore, while the lightspeed drive represented a leap forward for the Meme, it was still one generation behind EarthFleet. And, humans and their allies seemed far more likely to develop the TacDrive further – in fact, to make rapid technological progress in all areas with the help of the new AIs she’d learned of – if the Scourge FTL drive did not render the point moot.